Its fame rests on the irreverence and wit Strachey brought to bear on three men and a woman who had, until then, been regarded as heroes: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold and General Charles Gordon.
Strachey developed the idea for Eminent Victorians in 1912, when he was living on occasional journalism and writing dilettante plays and verse for his Bloomsbury friends.
He hardened his views and concluded that the Victorian worthies had not just been hypocrites, but that they had bequeathed to his generation the "profoundly evil" system, "by which it is sought to settle international disputes by force".
Influenced by Sigmund Freud, Strachey depicts Florence Nightingale as an intense, driven woman who is both personally intolerable and admirable in her achievements.
[4] On 21 May 1918, Bertrand Russell wrote to Gladys Rinder from Brixton Prison, in which he was imprisoned for his anti-war campaigning:[5][6] It is brilliant, delicious, exquisitely civilized.
The warder came to my cell to remind me that prison was a place of punishment.The American critic Edmund Wilson wrote in the New Republic of 21 September 1932, not long after Strachey's death: "Lytton Strachey's chief mission, of course, was to take down once and for all the pretensions of the Victorian age to moral superiority ... neither the Americans nor the English have ever, since Eminent Victorians appeared, been able to feel quite the same about the legends that had dominated their pasts.
Up until that point, as Strachey remarked in the preface, Victorian biographies had been "as familiar as the cortège of the undertaker, and wear the same air of slow, funereal barbarism."
British Labour politician Roy Hattersley wrote: "Lytton Strachey's elegant, energetic character assassinations destroyed for ever the pretensions of the Victorian age to moral supremacy.".